Henry Roth - Mercy of a Rude Stream - The Complete Novels

“Just about everything. If you’d looked out of the window when the train passed 119th Street, three houses, you’d’ve seen where we live.”

“Which way?”

“Oh. East.”

“Is that so? You know, my brother Irving just set up a ladies’-housedress-manufacturing plant on East 119th Street.”

“Yeah? Where?”

“In a loft east of Third Avenue.”

“Is that so? On 119th?”

“Ladies’ housedresses are all the rage today. Finished goods. He has about a hundred operators there.”

“Huh!” Ira exclaimed. “A hundred. Well, just walk a block west from your brother’s place. Now you know where I live.”

“That is a coincidence.”

“I’ll say. And you, where do you live?”

“I live on 161st and Sommers in the Bronx. It’s a very quiet neighborhood, nice but not too showy, just across the Harlem River. We own our own house.”

“Oh, you live in a private house?”

“No. It’s a small apartment house. One family to a floor. We live a flight up.”

“Yeah, we do too.” Ira grinned.

“How do you go home?”

“Me? I have to take the Broadway subway and switch to Lenox at 96th. You take the Bronx Park train?”

“No. I take the Ninth Avenue El.”

“No foolin’. The Ninth Avenue El?”

“Yes. It lets me off a few blocks from where I live.”

“Oh. But it’s in the Bronx?”

“Yes. The near Bronx.”

Walking with Larry in public was different, Ira realized, from encountering him those few times in hall and lunchroom. Exchanges in school were mostly confined to school, had the school environment to buttress them. Here in the street, Ira felt a certain awkwardness of new acquaintance. Also, personal appearance mattered more. It was not only that Ira was conscious of the contrast between Larry’s “rich” clothes and his own rumpled, seedy ones; but that Larry’s appearance, Larry’s bearing, drew the attention of passersby, women especially, young and (to Ira) middle-aged, to which Larry seemed to pay no attention, as something he took for granted. He wore no eyeglasses; he was at least three inches taller than Ira. Not only were his features extraordinarily regular, and his skin the fresh, dappled smoothness of cherished rearing, but his whole body was finely proportioned, again “regular”—except for his thick eyebrows, like wings above his soft, brown eyes, and arms, longer than average, even disproportionate, and his hands: they were exceptionally large. Taken together with the regularity of bodily proportion and feature, Ira was suddenly reminded of the cast of Michelangelo’s David in the Metropolitan Museum: the frowning eyebrows, the big expressive hands, one in front, one reaching over his shoulder for the sling. “Are you still on the rifle team?” Larry asked.

“Yeah.”

“Really like it?”

“Yeah, sure. You don’t go in for any sports?”

“I’m in The Pirates of Penzance . In the chorus. I don’t know if you can call it sports.”

“Oh, yeah, yeah, you told me. You sing.”

“Are you going to see it?”

“Nah, it’s gonna cost a dollar. It’s at night.”

“It’s very good. It really has a good cast. And I don’t say that because I’m in it.”

“I know. I saw a piece of it in the assembly. I liked it.”

“That was our preview. For publicity. We sang ‘A paradox, a paradox, a most ingenious paradox.’”

“That’s right. It was funny.”

Larry laughed, a deprecating, introductory laugh before something amusing: “When the stage director isn’t listening, some of us in the chorus sing, ‘A pair o’ socks, a pair o’ socks, a most ingenious pair o’ socks.’”

Ira grinned — self-consciously. How little attention Larry paid to the crowd of students moving with them, some of whom turned to smile in appreciation of his freely delivered snatch of song.

Musical, his voice, and flawless the way he held a tune. “‘I am the captain of the Pinafore , and a right good captain too.’”

They were nearing Ninth Avenue, the dark El structure’s shadow charring the avenue below. And like so many beacons in the bustling gloom beneath the El, the United Cigar store’s electric lights were already blazing around the margins of the show window.

“Do you smoke?” Larry asked.

“I had a little pipe — I liked it — but I left it in my white jacket when I was hustlin’ soda.”

“Hustling soda? Oh, yes, you did tell me,” Larry added quickly. “Selling it.”

“Yeah. So now I smoke—” He was about to say yenems , other people’s, but that was Yiddish; Larry wouldn’t understand. So Ira grimaced, shrugged negligently instead.

“I like a pipe too,” said Larry. “I’ve got a calabash I bought in Bermuda. And a Dunhill. But they’re too bulky to take into class. And you have to carry a tobacco pouch too. You smoke cigarettes, don’t you?”

“Oh, sure, sure.”

“Let’s stop in here. I’ll get a pack of Camels, okay? I like Camels. Do you?”

“Yeah. I don’t like Luckies—”

“Not a cough in a carload.”

“Yeah. They’re raw as hell. Maybe after you get used to ’em. My grandfather smokes Melachrinos. Not even half a Melachrino at a time. They’re mild, but boy, do they cost. You know what he does?”

They had almost reached the corner. “Puts a toothpick in the end of his cigarette?” Larry was beguiled.

“Oh, no. He puts ’em in a paper cigarette holder and takes maybe three and a half puffs. Then he dinches it.”

“Dinches it? I never heard that one. Clinches it?”

“All right, clinches it.”

They paused at the corner. “You’re Jewish, aren’t you?” Larry asked.

Well, it had come, the ineluctable question. In a way he had invited it, Ira thought, but it had to come sooner or later; it always did. So, if this was as far as — what? — their friendship would go, they could always joke with each other once in a while in school. “Yeah, I’m Jewish,” Ira stated, as appeasingly as he could.

“I just wanted to make sure. I am too.”

There could be no more generous spoofing on the part of a gentile. It was charitable in the extreme, a humorous unguent alleviating the chronic sore spot.

“Oh, yeah?” Ira prolonged his drawl — making sure his disbelief registered.

“I am!” Wings of Larry’s dense eyebrows converged. “What did you think I was?”

“Aw, you’re kidding!”

“I’m not!”

They had stopped — because Ira had — on the very curb of the street corner, stopped and stood there, toes on the granite curb, while the crowd flowed past them into the deep shadow and across the avenue through openings in trolley and auto traffic. Strange pause. It was like something inside the self, not merely bodily arrest. The guy wasn’t kidding; he couldn’t be kidding. That would be taking things too far, and they never could have gotten this far, if he were that kind of a guy. There were goyim , sure, the straight-faced practical jokers; but hell, he had learned to tell those a mile off. And there were others like Billy, who never showed the slightest sign of even being conscious of Ira’s Jewishness. This called for reexamination, for keenest scrutiny. Yes, there he was, still, Larry, regular Arrow Collar countenance, well, almost, under gray felt hat, in fine navy-blue wool topcoat over matching tweed jacket, and wearing a blue knit tie. In good taste everything, you just felt it, even if you didn’t know what good taste was, refinement, oh, what the hell, had to be gentile, with that kind of luster — but no. Or maybe not: the lips were a little too thick, rolled out: Jewish softness there, Jewish sympathy. No, Larry couldn’t possibly pretend to being so earnest. He must mean it—